For the next two weeks you can save 30% on BWI’s Web Usability and Design Analysis. The regular prices is $29.95, now just $19.95. Great way to improve your website!

Web Usability and Design Analysis

Google’s Webmaster Tools and Analytics have just been on a roll lately. They have added new features to Webmaster Tools and Analytics, and will most likely be dumping out more stuff soon. They are obviously paying more attention to these services now.

Here are a few posts I have recently made about them in my main blog:

• Webmaster Tools Site Performance – A New Cool Tool
• Six Custom Advanced Segments I Like to Use with Google Analytics
• Turkey Day Web Traffic
• Does Google Webmaster Tools Keyword Significance Provide Value?
• Google Webmaster Tools Now Has Keyword Significance
• Manage Intelligence Alerts with Google Analytics
• How to Use Google Analytics to Track Your Email Campaigns

Here is nice little website checklist if you are a small business owner with a website. It basically ensures you are covering the basics.

Here is a cool little plugin to help you get more comments on your posts. It tweets every time someone makes a comment: Vikinghammer Tweet

I’m sure many of you know by now using videos is a great way to market your site. Their fun, their viral, and can often make a deal. Simply putting your video on YouTube is not enough though. You have to optimize it. You have to make it visible to the major search engines besides just Google. You have to at least give it a fighting chance.

Tons of Others Competing Against You

So you got your video, and you’re ready to upload. Are you ready for the traffic? You probably don’t have to be. A common occurrence is that you will hardly get anything out of it. To make a video viral you have to do it right, you have to be competitive, and you have to remember there are others competing for that traffic as well. Have you done anything to optimize it for search engines? Most likely you are just hoping others will like your video.

Unless you are already a professional at video marketing, now might be the time to consider using a video SEO service, like the one provided by USO Networks. USO Networks is the world’s foremost leader in video creation, distribution and optimization, and their proprietary technology continually works to achieve the highest possible search rankings for videos.

Making a high quality video is not as easy as you may think. USO can help you with every aspect of the site besides just marketing it. They can help you with the content creation, the making of the video, and of course the marketing. Maximize your efforts for quality video, and make those efforts pay by having a well promoted one.

I was asked to take a look at PGi today, and noticed they are offering free web conferencing for a month. For any of you that are currently paying for this kind of service, now might be the time to switch, at least for a month.

PGi specializes in conferencing and collaboration tools. Can they do Webinars? Yes they can. Their conferencing services can handle anywhere from 30 to 30,000 attendees. They also have a few other interesting services. The have: Everyday Printing, Mobile Printing, and Document Delivery.

Everyday Faxing

Everyday faxing allows you to fax by email, receive fax by email, and store your faxes online for as long as thirty days. You can get local or toll free numbers, and if you want you can even run a free test fax to try it out from their site.

Mobile Printing

Mobile printing is very cool because you can actually print from your PDA. The way it works is you simply send the document to your nearest fax machine. Now a days, most fax machines print in high quality, so you should even be able to have a semi-reasonable printout.

Document Delivery

Document delivery is where they have the capability to take your raw data and reformat it for mass-distribution via encrypted email and secure fax. They offer disaster recovery protection with it, real time reporting, and 24/7 access so you can send that last minute project at 2:00 a.m. in the morning.

Overall a pretty cool service, but what caught my eye was that free web conferencing for a month. Depending on who you use, that kind of service can cost an arm and a leg.

What’s the matter with your website? Well…most likely lots of stuff. Most webmasters that are trying to improve their website are looking for ways to increase their sales, increase hits, and to simply get more positive action out of their visitors. It’s a tall order to accomplish all three, but it’s hardly impossible.

Defining Your Site

There are all sorts of free online test you can do to help improve your site, but the best thing you can do is to truly define your site to yourself. What the primary objective? Does it have more than one objective? Are you accomplishing any of the sites objectives well? Does it even have an objective besides getting tons of visitors?

Before you go out testing your site, repairing code, making new logos, stuff like that…know what and why the heck you are doing it. Otherwise you could be just spinning your wheels, and even worse, wasting money.

Getting Professional Feedback

Spending $79.95 on an analysis like the one offered by Best Web Image may seem like a waste of money. Who wants an analysis that basically bashes a website, especially when on a tight budget. If your sites business plan, or what I like to call “Site Plan” is focused on making a profit though, getting a heuristic analysis like this is essential.

The most important reason to get an analysis is the fact that it’s someone else’s eyes that will be determining the quality of your site. This is extremely critical because the odds are, you most likely want someone besides yourself to like your site. Way, way, way too often websites get built without one simple review from another person. Are you sure your site works fine? I’ve seen plenty of order forms that don’t work, and you know the webmaster want those forms to work.

Getting Feedback From Others is Good, Kind Of

Getting feedback from others is great, and is something I value most. Unfortunately feedback from others is often difficult to develop a plan from. Comments like “It’s great” or “It’s O.K.” doesn’t mean much. Hundreds of “it’s great” would be nice, but it still doesn’t tell you, as a webmaster, how to improve a site. Positive feedback may even decrease your sales. If your goal is to sell something, and all you do is cater to the positive feedback that, say for example, your site has great resources. Your focus might move toward pushing new visitors onto those resources. An initial plan to sell and make money has now been put on the back burner to accommodate general visitor feedback. Oops!

Why BWI’s Analysis is Essential for a New Webmaster

Having a heuristic analysis is critical to the things that matter most to you, getting visitors to accomplish your sites primary objective. An analysis is structured, it identifies known industry problems for visitors, and in the case of Best Web Image’s analysis, give reasoning for all of it’s findings.

Best Web Image’s Web Usability and Design Analysis can almost be used as a basic website standard for new and old webmasters. An actual standard for websites goes way beyond the analysis, but to give you an example what I mean here is the first item of business, Title of Site. It looks at the length, the keyword quality, and the “does it even make sense” quality. It would even identify if the title would make a poor bookmark. The first item of the analysis could substantially improve your return visitor rate, search engine positioning, usability, and credibility. ROI could be accomplished with this one bit of information. The analysis continues this way covering basic items that most webmasters simply don’t pay attention to, and they really should. Another example would be to see if your site has a contact page. It does? Good, well the analysis doesn’t stop there. It reports the quality of the contact page, ways it could be improved, and reasoning on how a poor contact page could effect your sales.

What Does The Analysis Cover?

The entire analysis, thirty five checks in all, offer extremely valuable checks for any webmasters. It looks at: navigation, site credibility, basic design concepts, forms, and the effectiveness of those forms. Many of the items on the list are expected by most web surfers, but as webmasters we often forget what all of those items are. The analysis checks for site inconsistencies, accessibility features or lack of, and its development for search engines. Delete all the answers from an analysis and a webmaster could use this repeatedly for all of their sites.

Two additional key factors for the analysis is the “Why It Matters” for every item looked at, and the conclusion of findings. It’s one thing to have someone tell you why you should change, it has a little more value though when there is substantial reasoning why. The conclusion of the analysis is a “What I would do first if this were my site” comment.

Your analysis might reveal several things that could use some improvement, and fixing them all at once might not be practical. Having knowledge of what should be fixed first reflects the level of importance, and will help a new webmaster in their decisions on what, if any, changes should be made.

To Get The Analysis

To get the thirty-five point analysis offered by Best Web Image you can go here: Web Usability and Design Analysis – Expectations should be set on “High”.

There are a few other analyses offered by Best Web Image, but if you want the most bang for your buck, I would suggest simply getting the one listed above. Regardless of experience levels webmasters are repeatedly impressed by this, really, low cost report.

Do any email marketing? There are a few ways to go about it. You can use a mailer website, where they manage your emails, and send the emails for you. You can host your own software on your server, or you can run software from your local computer and send email that way.

Using a service to manage your email mailings and subscribers can be an easy way to go, but it usually is associated with some kind of cost. You either have to pay a monthly fee depending on the number of subscribers, or you have to include one of their ads in your message. I’m personally not a fan of either one.

The second way to go is to host the software on your own server. There are some free ones that work OK at best, or you can get a paid version like Omnistar’s email marketing software. With the paid versions you typically can get support in regards to installing, and just the basics in running the software. I think one of the most important aspects of running your own software is that you are not limited to the number of subscribers. Many of the free scripts only support a limited number.

The third option is running your mail software from your local computer. Their are several powerful software packages out there, but two common issues come up with these. You risk getting kicked off of you internet service provider for possible spamming, and additionally, extra time is required integrating their software to work with your site. Not fun.

A few other things I like about software packages like Omnistar, is that is’t not just a bulk email marketing software. You can do site surveys, send automatic campaigns, and you can even set it up to email subscribers on their birthday. It also has sixteen templates that come with the software. The downside for some, is that it costs $257. That is chump change though if you have a mailing list of a thousand or more.

If you are interested in trying Omnistars software for free, you can sign up for a free trial: Demo Sign Up

I just wanted to let everyone who is using my Twitter Toolbar, and there are a whole bunch more than last time I updated, that their is a new update. You can now download Twitter Toolbar version 1.09, my latest version.

Latest Updates:

• Made it so that updates longer than 140 characters transfer you and the update to Twitters main update box for easy editing
• Added Link to Direct Messages
• Added Link to Follow Me!
• Fixed a conflicting access key

Current Issues and Things I Want

Version 1.09 isn’t really the version I wanted to release, but I have been using it for a while myself, and simply put, it’s better than version 1.08. It’s mainly because every time I tweeted before, I always wondered if my tweet was too long. If it’s too long now, it will take you to Twitters Page  with your update in the update box, so it is easy to edit. I also made a few minor changes, and added a couple of menu items.

The next version I plan on releasing will be a much larger improvement. Many of you are begging for more dynamic content. The toolbar needs to read what is going on in your world, and become much more than a fancy submit button. I want it to show number of new replies, messages, and I would really love a scrolling text of live updates. All are possible, but building Firefox add-ons is not my specialty, so please give me time.

Please let me know if you having in problems or have a suggestion!

As a web devloper working remotely is pretty much assumed. I have several projects going, and managing them can get a little crazy. Working on my own, and typically by the hour, I can not skip out on tracking my minutes. Forget hours, I track minutes. Way too often I am stuck doing a little five minute job, one that you could not honestly charge an hour for, and in the past I used to just say don’t worry about it. Not! I won’t make any money that way. So I track all my minutes now, and if you are a contractor working with many clients I would say drop what your doing right now, and set up a method to track your minutes.

Do More Than Track Time

Besides just tracking your time, if you are not doing this already, is to track your projects progress. Take advantage of all the project management sites out there. A project management software or service can not only track your time, but create an excellent, professional, method of keeping in communication with your client. It also lets them easily see how the project is going, and potentially add new tasks. I always like to find the extra job in their.

Easy Projects has an nice platform for their collaboration software,  and additionally offer a free 15 day trial period if you want to just try it out. It’s ideal for tracking. Another site, Celoxis, offers a great project management tool. They also offer a free trial period of 30 days. Could be the way to go if you have a quick project. Whatever you decide to do, if you are not tracking already, start tracking now more accurately now. Your now working for free are you?